A Study in Survival

Subtitled 'Conan Doyle solves the final problem', this is one of the most fascinating books bearing on the survival question to be published in the last 10 years. Readers may recall that Conan Doyle spent much of the last 15 years of his life promoting Spiritualism in the wake of the loss of life during the First World War, and that there is good evidence that he was able to communicate effectively after his death. This book, written by a university teacher, offers a completely novel method of communication, which arose serendipitously after the death of his dog when he opened a volume by Conan Doyle and came across the following words: 'his exit was a speedy and painless as could be desired', words which actually refers to the death of a dog in a story. The book is full of such incidents, including one involving Conan Doyle's daughter and a ring which her father had given her for her 17th birthday. This had been a test question for many years, and Straughan produces some lines from a book called The Refugees referring to a ring. This was the first occasion that any such accurate reference had come up in nearly 60 years.

There are many striking cases in the book were questions are answered in a very direct manner, some even referring to the author's own health problems. Given Conan Doyle's own interests in such matters as dogs, health, military strategy and sport, many of the questions are related to these themes. The reader will want to know what proportion of 'hits' are involved - around 50%, which is pretty astonishing. The method involved blindly pulling a book off the shelf of Conan Doyle volumes and opening it at random. The books were then not put back in the same place. On this basis, one would expect no hits at all, but the correspondence between the questions and answers is often extremely precise. This raises the question of the mechanism involved. Certainly, it is a remarkable intelligence and must almost be a combination of the discarnate Conan Doyle and super-ESP. Towards the end of the book, it becomes apparent that Conan Doyle seems to be playing a more active role in shaping of the book, consistent with his passion for spiritualism while he was alive. No book can offer knockdown proof of survival, but this study makes a very persuasive case for survival of consciousness over a long period.